Remote Operation, Industry 4.0, Modularized Automation – 2016's Namur Assembly Sets the Course...

Related Vendors

DÜPERTHAL Sicherheitstechnik GmbH & Co. KG

Glatt Ingenieurtechnik GmbH

EDL Anlagenbau Gesellschaft mbH

NAMUR e. V. c/o Bayer AG NAMUR-Geschäftsstelle

Yokogawa’s Vice President Satoru Kurosu supplemented the ideas and emphasized the increasing value of services in the portfolio of the automation group. All this however, is unthinkable without a high degree of IT security. Yokogawa believes it is playing a pioneering role here, if for nothing else then for its many projects with Shell and Cisco.

Challenges in Plant Performance

One of the biggest challenges in the process industry is posed at present by the dynamics of market demand. Flexibility of the plants and introduction times of new products became drivers of improvement and optimization of value-creation chains. An essential requirement emerging from this is to operate the production plants in the best possible manner.

For Dr. Udo Enste von LeiKon (Engineer) performance consists of a combination of different aspects. Individual aspects are say increase in processability and robustness, improvement of product quality and throughput, increase in plant availability, increase of energy and material efficiency as well as flexibility of production, adaped to the current marked demand and to the current energy and raw material prices.

How to Evaluate Plant Performance

For extensive evaluation of plant performance, one must determine evaluation criteria and measures. But defining and evaluating these KPIs (Key Performance Indices) in practice is frequently more difficult than imagined. As normally, all objectives cannot be optimized together, one must fall back on quality functionals. A quality functional can be described mathematically, often however, the quality functions becomes implicit, based on experience values or formed through the reduction of one or a few target variables in the heads of the decision maker.

“The matter is rendered more difficult by the fact that this quality functional is dynamic in nature, and sometimes, site managers and plant operators have different objectives”, claims Enste based on her own experience. Meanwhile, there are many concepts for representing the key performance indices better and the utility of such KPIs has been proven multiple times. But the challenges lie elsewhere. “It sounds real good, but often, the information is missing or there are data distortions or data gaps”, Enste gives one example.

Even interactions between cause and effect as well as effect couplings are by far not as clear as one would have desired. It is proven from experience that one must use a reference KPI. Two variants are available here, reference to the past and a theoretical optimum. The first variant involving human beings is more suitable in this context. Another challenge: Information in online systems is still stored in data points, the key for effective analysis and optimization of the plant performance however lies in information models. Models for context-based online evaluations are missing here. He mentioned the research project More as a counter example.

More about the Namur Annual General Meeting on the next page ...

(ID:44383205)